Nearly 300 murders still on the books from past decade, but Wisconsin's clearance rate exceeds national average

Jul. 25, 2013

Written by

Gannett Wisconsin Media Investigative Team

Lipshetz, Terry

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Ask questions and comment with reporter Nick Penzenstadler and investigators during a live chat at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Radio discussion

On Monday, Wisconsin Public Radio will feature I-Team reporter Eric Litke from 4:30 to 4:45 p.m. Litke will discuss his story that highlighted missteps police made in some murder investigations that have gone cold. You can stream the show live at http://wpr.org/webcasting/live.cfm. Choose an Ideas Network option.

About ‘Cold Cases’

Gannett Wisconsin Media is publishing an exclusive four-week series called Cold Cases: Tracking Wisconsin’s Unsolved Murders. Cold Cases is the most comprehensive unsolved-murders project of regional and statewide interest ever assembled in a print and digital format. The Gannett Wisconsin Media Investigative Team spearheaded the project in conjunction with local reporters at all 10 Gannett Wisconsin Media news organizations, including Post-Crescent Media. The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism in Madison also partnered with the newspapers. The intent of Cold Cases is to generate new, valuable leads and tips for Wisconsin homicide investigators. Many of them have hit roadblocks or face dead-ends.

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The term “cold case” conjures images of faded photos of long-ago murders. But hundreds of homicides have gone unsolved in Wisconsin in just the past decade, a Gannett Wisconsin Media analysis found.

A review of state crime statistics determined 277 murder cases remain open from Hayward to Racine during a 10-year period ending in 2012.

Several trends emerged from the Gannett investigative review:

• Eighty-one percent of the unsolved murders occurred in Milwaukee, a city of nearly 600,000 people that averaged 94 homicides each year during the decade.

• A gun was used in nearly half the murders — far ahead of knives, blunt objects, beatings, strangulation and arson.

• Most victims were black men.

• The average victim was 33 years old.

While investigators are concerned about the number of open cases, Wisconsin’s clearance rate on murders is considerably higher than the national average. An analysis of state justice statistics showed state policing agencies solved 82 percent of the 1,564 murders during the past decade.

“The national clearance rate is around 65 percent,” said Aki Roberts, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “That slid in recent years and many blamed it on bad police work, but research has concluded there is more stranger and firearm violence, which is much harder to solve.”

Time is a crucial factor in murder investigations. A 2011 University of New Mexico study found that more than half of solved murders get cracked in the first 48 hours — and the probability drops to less than 1 percent after a year has passed.

Still, police throughout Wisconsin never give up on cases, said West Allis Police Capt. Chris Botsch, whose department has two unsolved cases from the past decade on its books.

“Once a case starts to get excessively old, like 20 years, you run the risk of people not remembering or being able to make identifications,” Botsch said. “But then again, time may change motivations and witnesses may no longer be associated with the person they were protecting — or may have a change of heart. That’s what we hope to tap into.”

Common threads of violence

Police say each case comes with unique challenges. But nationwide, as in Wisconsin, several factors increase the likelihood a murder will never be solved.

“Usually homicides go unsolved when it’s committed by a firearm, by strangers to the victim and when it’s a felony homicide, meaning it’s committed along with another crime like robbery or rape,” Roberts said. “We also see a trend with younger adults that have social circles that are difficult to understand and who tend to interact with strangers more often.”

Firearms are difficult-to-track murder weapons because there’s no physical contact between offender and victim. Advances in ballistic technology can help track guns, but murders are often committed with stolen guns that are dumped after the killings, Roberts said.

Murder victims in Wisconsin come from all walks of life, despite a perception most are career criminals, said Lt. Keith Balash, head of Milwaukee’s cold case unit.

“The motives and victims in the 600 cases we have back to 1990 are all over the board,” Balash said. “That’s from gang-related to drug crimes, prostitution, domestic violence, robberies gone bad and completely innocent people.”

A small number of Wisconsin’s cold cases from the past decade — 2 percent — are known to be gang-related, while 11 percent have been tied to drug crimes.

Historically, cases also are very difficult to crack when the body of a murder victim is moved or hidden.

“Most of the time when you have those second crime scene scenarios, your physical evidence isn’t there,” Balash said. “Blood spattering, bullet casings or whatever it might be is not there, and there’s usually no one around that saw an offender.”

Reviving cold cases with DNA

While good, old-fashioned detective work can lead to big breaks in long-unsolved murders, advanced scientific testing can heat up a cold case quickly.

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DNA testing procedures have grown by leaps and bounds since the late 1980s. Today, a small biological sample left at a crime scene easily can be linked to a database of known criminal offenders.

Milwaukee’s four-person cold case unit revisits 200 to 400 cases a year and resubmits dozens of DNA samples for cases 10 years old and older to get new analysis.

“That DNA often comes from the autopsy that showed signs of struggle and we’ll have material underneath fingernails,” Balash said. “That’s damning to a bad guy.”

A recent display of a powerful DNA database is the 1992 investigation into the stabbing deaths of Tanna Togstad and Timothy Mumbrue, who were killed at a rural Weyauwega home. Police spent more than 20 years looking into potential suspects, but no arrests were made.

Then, earlier this year, a major development in an unrelated case put the Togstad-Mumbrue investigation back on the front burner.

On Feb. 4, the state Department of Justice announced that Glendon Gouker of Oklahoma had been charged with the 1990 rape of a 20-year-old woman in Iola. At the same time those charges were leveled, police identified Gouker as a “person of interest” in the murders of Togstad and Mumbrue.

Gouker was linked to the rape by DNA evidence testing that was conducted as part of a renewed look at the case. Records indicated the DNA analyzed was 44 trillion times more likely to have come from the 20-year-old woman and Gouker than from the woman and another random person.

“The killer or killers of this couple left evidence behind when they entered Togstad’s home and savagely murdered these victims,” Waupaca County Sheriff Brad Hardel said earlier this year.

Hardel said investigators are seeking a conclusive link between Gouker and the Weyauwega murders, and hope the public can provide tips that put him in the area when the 1992 stabbings were committed.

Justice still fleeting

Some of the unresolved cases have little evidence, few potential suspects and virtually no solid leads. But nearly one-third had suspects who were identified, but not charged.

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Police work is only half the battle to clearing a homicide and obtaining justice for victims’ families. In the 2002 death of Hayward’s Jeffrey Schlotterer, police were convinced they had enough to charge a suspect, but the district attorney declined to prosecute.

Others can be cleared by “exceptional means” outside the control of law enforcement, such as when a suspect dies before being convicted.

That happened in 2003 when Jeffrey Baenen, the man Green Bay police suspected of killing 27-year-old Timothy Braun, shot himself in the head in Eau Claire after police attempted to stop him for driving a car with a defective taillight. Police closed the case.

In 2006, Outagamie County officials cracked a cold case from 1968 when they charged Robert Mitchell, 76, with killing Martin Jansen Jr. at Cloud Buick in Grand Chute. Mitchell died in a nursing home two weeks after the first-degree homicide charge was dismissed due to his failing health.

“That case broke after going back and sorting through everything and re-contacting people,” said Outagamie County District Attorney Carrie Schneider. “Interviews and some admissions gave us enough to charge in that case.”

Even when cold cases are solved and a conviction is reached, as in the 1988 death of Beloit’s David Landwehr, family and friends can feel cheated by light sentences.

The suspect in that case, Ezequiel Lopez-Zavala, was arrested in the state of Washington in 2007 with a broken taillight, returned to Wisconsin and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

That inspired Landwehr’s friend, Terri Garcia, to write a book chronicling 28 other cold cases in Rock County. The book generated several new tips for Beloit and Janesville police.

“The problem is the longer these cases go cold, the less likely someone will be held responsible,” Garcia said. “And even when they are caught, they might not even get what they deserve.”

'We have to find a way'

Jack Levin, professor of criminology and sociology at Northeastern University in Boston,said the nature of murder has changed considerably over the years — and it’s had an impact on solving cases.

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“If you look at the general picture, you will see that the cases that go unsolved tend to be murders committed by total strangers,” Levin said. “In the typical murder case, the killer is a friend, neighbor, family member, co-worker or acquaintance.

“Not only is the relationship (to the victim) known, but so is the motive. And that helps very much in the investigation. But when the killer is a stranger, then none of these things are known. The police don’t know the relationship between the killer and the victim — if there was one at all. And they don’t understand the motivation, in many cases.”

Fifty years ago, when the clearance rate for murders nationwide was 90 percent, police were much more likely to have an active crime scene, a confession and eyewitnesses, Levin said.

“Nowadays, there are too many murders where police are left with a dump site and skeletal remains,” he said. “It makes the cases very difficult to solve.”

Increasingly sophisticated DNA testing helps, Levin said.

“It’s theoretically easier to solve cases that may not have been solvable years ago,” he said. “(But) state crime labs simply don’t have the resources to investigate thoroughly with fingerprints and DNA and other physical evidence at a crime scene.”